It's Always Right Now, Until It's Later The monologuist Daniel Kitson returns to St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn with this show.Credit
Pavel Antonov

A constellation of light bulbs glows from the stage at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, where the monologuist extraordinaire Daniel Kitson has set up his own planetarium. In “It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later,” which opened on Sunday night and runs through Jan. 29, Mr. Kitson maps an earthly cosmology: the points of light in two separate lives that might otherwise be lost to the shadows.

Those bulbs? They represent what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” in this case in the unremarkable existences of William Rivington and Caroline Carpenter, two people who never knew each other but appear to have resided in the same corner of England at roughly the same time. These are moments that wedged themselves in the memories of William and Caroline — recollections of scenes from marriages and friendships and solitary visits to graveyards — and they tend to flare up without obvious regard to chronology.

Mr. Kitson — a soft, rumpled, bearded man who suggests a human-size hobbit — roams purposefully amid the bulbs as their filaments brighten and dim. He crouches and climbs a footstool to cradle them with his hands, as if they were as fragile as bird’s eggs, infinitely precious to him and to us.

Preciousness of another sort is a danger in the kind of sentimental journey that Mr. Kitson undertakes here. Even Woolf didn’t avoid that pitfall. But Mr. Kitson, whose “Interminable Suicide of Gregory Church“ was a hit at St. Ann’s a year ago, exudes a narrative urgency that tends to dissolve stickiness. And whenever his show seems to be melting into something like the Kodak commercials that grew misty at “the times of your life,” he seasons the treacle with grit, salt and preposterously apt turns of phrase.

At the show’s beginning the Yorkshire-born Mr. Kitson, whose very spectacles seem to glint with a fiery fervor, warns us that though this is a tale of a man and a woman, it is “no more about love than the Bible is about woodworking.” William and Caroline pursue very different romantic paths, into prickly bachelorhood (in his case) and connubial comfort (in hers).

Neither route offers much in the way of high drama. There’s a nose-breaking bicycle accident (hers), a blind date that turns into a diatribe against all blind dates (his), a couple of youthful on-the-cusp nights (for each) when the future and the past seem to coalesce into a sort of infinite time tunnel. Warmly observed and coolly detailed, these are all vignettes you might encounter in gentle kitchen-sink British novels from pretty much any decade from the 1930s on.

What makes the play something to be seen and heard, rather than read, is Mr. Kitson’s unconditionally engaged and engaging presence. He guides us along parallel, switchback trails from cradle to grave like a Sherpa who never ceases to wonder at the details of a landscape he has traversed many times.

There are obstacles on those paths, including a stutter that erupts in Mr. Kitson’s speech from time to time. His droll, impromptu commentary on those stutters (he sort of deconstructs them) reminds us of the raw effort that telling a story — and imagining other lives — demands.

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It also mercifully interrupts a tone that leans dangerously toward cracker-barrel omniscience, evoking Garrison Keillor spinning folksy tales of Lake Wobegon crossed with the avuncular narrator of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.” In “Interminable Suicide,” in which he tried to imagine what drove an elderly man he had never met to his death, Mr. Kitson himself was a leading character. Here he is more or less God, who for theatrical purposes is less interesting than Mr. Kitson himself.

There’s enough of Mr. Kitson’s very human individuality here, though, to keep all-seeing smugness at bay. In this sense that stutter is — you should pardon the term — a godsend. So is Mr. Kitson’s little-boy infatuation with the tools of his trade: words that dance off the tongue (“Who among us doesn’t really enjoy the word toboggan?” he asks in a delighted aside) and sentences that twist as deviously and surprisingly as life itself.

A theater review on Monday about “It’s Always Right Now, Until It’s Later,” a one-man show by Daniel Kitson at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, misstated the word of which Mr. Kitson asks, “Who among us doesn’t really enjoy” it? It is “toboggan,” not “bobsled.”

A version of this review appears in print on January 9, 2012, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: Parallel Points of Light Ricochet Across Time. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe